U.S. military says militant Sunni leader caught in raid

BAGHDAD – The U.S. military said yesterday that a leader of a Sunni insurgent group was arrested last month during a joint Iraqi-U.S. operation.

Fakri Hadi Gari was among 10 people arrested July 24 during raids in the northern city of Mosul, the U.S. military said in a statement.

Gari is suspected of organizing attacks carried out by the insurgent group Ansar al-Islam and of being in charge of its recruiting and financing, the statement said.

Ansar al-Islam has roots in the country's Kurdish region and has been blamed for suicide bombings throughout the country,

Also yesterday, the Iraqi government said it had arrested a man in the slaying of an Iraqi TV journalist and two of her colleagues in 2006.

Yasser Mohammed Hamad al-Takhi, 25, was shown on Iraqi television in a videotaped confession describing how he and three other men, including one of his brothers, had set up a checkpoint on a road outside Samarra to stop a car carrying the journalist, Atwar Bahjat, and two members of her crew.

Al-Takhi said he had been working for a Sunni armed group with ties to al-Qaeda in Iraq.

Bahjat, who worked for Al Arabiya, a satellite TV station based in Dubai, had been returning to Baghdad after having covered the bombing of a Shiite shrine in Samarra, an event that pushed Iraq into sectarian warfare. Al-Takhi said he raped Bahjat at gunpoint inside the car and then shot her in the neck, head and chest.

Al-Takhi's brother was arrested earlier and has admitted to his role in the crime, officials said.